OLYMPICS PROFILE. OLYMPIC SNAPSHOT DOMINIQUE MOCEANU.

The Little Savior?

Gymnast's Sweet Face Belies Her Unbridled Competitiveness

May 12, 1996|By Bonnie DeSimone, Tribune Staff Writer.

HOUSTON — Her face belongs at the center of a Valentine doily. Her competitive edge could open paper cuts. The contrast enchants people, and it has made Dominique Moceanu the potential pet of the Atlanta Games, the latest budding branch of a royal family tree, even before the U.S. gymnastics team is selected.

Her talent is obvious. Junior national champion at age 12, youngest-ever senior national champion at 13 last year, almost certainly an Olympic medal candidate.

But nearly as important as Moceanu's athletic skill is her knack for creating the illusion of a child at play when she is performing under killing pressure.

Gymnastics, whose image has been under siege in this country for the last year, desperately needs a happy little soldier. Moceanu, who wakes up most mornings without an alarm clock, seems to sense this.

"I like to show the fun of gymnastics with my personality," she tells interviewers, over and over.

She and her coach, Bela Karolyi, who share a common heritage, are on track to stage a ghostly re-enactment of 20 years ago. Then, the dark-haired Karolyi and his brooding teenage Romanian star, Nadia Comaneci, left the rest of the world in their chalk dust.

Two decades later, Karolyi's hair has gone to salt-and-pepper. He has quit, come back, written a book and been written about, in most unflattering terms, by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Joan Ryan, in "Little Girls in Pretty Boxes."

Wittingly or not, Moceanu works at casting her coach in a positive light. She was "intimidated" by him at first, she told an auditorium packed with reporters in Atlanta last month, but no more. "I feel a lot more comfortable talking with Bela now," she said. "We're really getting closer and stronger and more confident with each other."

Moceanu is the right girl in the right Olympic year, a home year. If she had come along four years later, she would have been barred from competing by new international rules that will set a minimum age of 16. Moceanu won't even be 15 until September.

Her parents, unable to foresee that, nudged her into the sport early for other reasons.

"It was a commitment made before I got married," said her father, Dimitry Moceanu. A junior national champion himself in Romania, his mother and teachers prevailed on him to give up the sport at 16 and concentrate on his education.

"When that happened, I promised myself that when I got married, my first child, whether it was a boy or a girl, I'd like them to be a gymnast," said Dimitry, a blunt-spoken, compact man whose round brown eyes mirror his daughter's. "If I had to eat bread and drink water."

In 1979, he defected, as Karolyi would the next year, to flee the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu. Moceanu and his wife, Camelia, were married in Greece, then settled temporarily in Southern California. Dominique was born in Hollywood. Their next stop was Chicago, where Dimitry owned a Greek restaurant, Aphrodite's, on North Sheridan near Loyola University.

It was in their Highland Park back yard that the Moceanus began to document their daughter's remarkable coordination. They curled her tiny hands around a clothesline, then gradually let go and backed away. She hung on. Dimitry decided it was time to call Karolyi, who was fresh from coaching Mary Lou Retton to an Olympic gold medal.

Dominique was 3 years old at the time. Karolyi told them to ring him back in six years. Dimitry waited exactly that long and no longer.

By then, the family had moved to Florida, where Dimitry ran a used-car dealership, the same business he is in now. They had a second daughter, Christina. Dominique loved the fishing trips to the Gulf with her father, but gave them up in a heartbeat, which was about how long Karolyi needed to swoon over her.

"There was no doubt in my mind," Karolyi said. "That little kitten-type of playful way she has of expressing herself--that caught my attention right away."

Inevitably, toiling in Karolyi's gym, Moceanu's path would cross those of her spiritual ancestors, Comaneci and Retton.

At an exhibition four years ago, Comaneci stared at the little girl's exotic cheekbones and thought, "This girl is not American." Later, she became friendly with the Moceanus, and by the 1994 nationals, Dominique was wandering over to sit on Comaneci's lap during breaks, chirping away in Romanian. Passersby assumed they were mother and daughter.

Retton lives in Houston now with her husband and daughter and visits the gym sometimes after workouts. Moceanu called her recently, out of the blue, but posed no heavy questions about stress or fame.

"It blew me away," said Retton. "Usually with gymnasts, it's `yes' and `no' and `I just wanna hit my routines.' But she wanted to chit-chat. She is such an outgoing, loving girl. I took that as a hint that I might want to get more involved in the next few months.

"The Olympic team hasn't even been picked yet. My gut feeling about all this (attention) is it kind of scares me. She is going to go into the Olympic Games with so much pressure to be the star that gymnastics hasn't had in so long."

Indeed, Moceanu did look like she was flagging a bit the day of the media blitz in Atlanta. And why not? She has not competed since last fall due to a lingering heel injury, but she has smiled through commercials and magazine cover shoots. She has three big-time meets coming up: the U.S. Classic in Colorado Springs next weekend, the U.S. nationals and the all-or-nothing Olympic trials in June.

And reporters are asking questions like "What were you like as a kid?" as if her feet dangling from the chair didn't make the point.

"I'm still a kid," she said.

"She is moody sometimes, but that makes her human," said Karolyi.

The body is balsa wood. The expectations are unyielding oak. It remains to be seen how the sapling holds up.